This section describes some of the benefits of business continuity planning.
Why prepare for emergencies?
Emergencies can disrupt businesses, affecting profits and operations. This is bad for employees, shareholders, customers and communities.
The key advice to businesses is to ensure you have robust, flexible business continuity management arrangements in place (external link) that will ensure that the impact of any emergency on your business will be minimised, and should help your business recover quickly.
It makes sense to put in place Business Continuity Management arrangements because they help to:
- Develop a clearer understanding of how your organisation works.
- Protect your business and ensure that it will not impact on your employees, share-holders, partners, contractors, stakeholders and especially your customers.
- Protect the reputation of your business.
- Produce clear cost benefits: by identifyingand preparing for disruptions in advance this can reduce your financial expenditure and management time in the long term.
- Ensure compliance and corporate governance.
Business Continuity Planning should be proportionate to the risks for your business as it is difficult to plan for every possible eventuality.
It is recommended that you develop a generic business continuity plan and generic capabilities, focusing on the impact of different types of disruptive events in your local area.
